Rob Weidner is a gimbal/Movi Pro camera operator based in Cape Town, South Africa who enjoys empowering others with his creativity and optimism. Aside from that, he can also make a mean pizza and is ready to travel the world with his kit.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment

The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.

Simply by writing the word, I can plant a feeling in your mind. Can the flu virus do that?

geometric progression.

The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.

gradualists,

Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen,

Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don’t? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?

Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating.

These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

virology.

When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused.

six degrees of separation.

Proximity overpowered similarity.

We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble.

people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

“uncanny genius for being at the center of events.”

people who control word-of-mouth epidemics—a Maven.

Maven

it means one who accumulates knowledge.

To be a Maven is to be a teacher. But it is also, even more emphatically, to be a student. Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know.

In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks.

Connectors are social glue:

Moine’s argument is that what separates a great salesman from an average one is the number and quality of answers they have to the objections commonly raised by potential clients.

the power of positive thinking will overcome so many things.

“if you don’t try, you’ll never succeed.”

The subtle circumstances surrounding how we say things may matter more than what we say.

“television advertisements would be most effective if the visual display created repetitive vertical movement of the television viewers’ heads (e.g.,

the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.

cultural microrhythms—is

motor mimicry.

We imitate each other’s emotions as a way of expressing support and caring and, even more basically, as a way of communicating with each other.

If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.

Senders have special personalities. They

Affective Communication Test

the Stickiness Factor. They discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how

There is a maxim in the advertising business that an advertisement has to be seen at least six times before anyone will remember it.

Viewers were told that if they could find the gold box in their issues of Parade and TV Guide, they could write in the name of any record on the Columbia list and get that record free.

fear experiments

including a map of the campus,

subtle but significant change in presentation.

Distracter.

Levels would pop back up if the Muppets came back, but we couldn’t afford to keep losing them like that.”

visual-blending exercises—segments that teach children that reading consists of blending together

perceptual span.

If you can track where someone’s fovea is moving and what they are fixating on, in other words, you can tell with extraordinary precision what they are actually looking at and what kind of information they are actually receiving.

mutual exclusivity.

that small children have difficulty believing that any one object can have two different names.